How to run a million jobs

At SC08, several experts organized an informal session to share information on up-and-coming solutions for expressing, managing, and executing "megajobs." They also discussed ways of repackaging work to avoid megajobs altogether.

Here iSGTW shares the latest ideas and developments about megajobs with its readers, and plans to follow up with articles on various mentioned technologies and trends in the coming months.

Biting off a megajob-it's a lot to chew

As large systems surpass 200,000 processors, more scientists are running "megajobs", thousands to millions of identical or very similar, but independent, jobs executed on separate processors. From biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics to genetics, mechanical engineering, economics and computational finance, researchers want an easy way to specify and manage many jobs, arrange inputs, and aggregate outputs. They want to readily identify successful and failed jobs, repair failures, and get on with the business of research. System administrators need effective ways to process large numbers of jobs for multiple users.

Sudanese Lost Boys visit Fermilab

A group of Lost Boys, Sudanese refugees, will visit Fermilab for a lunchtime presentation at 12:15 p.m. on Dec. 17.

Decades of war and genocide in Sudan have caused about 200,000 deaths, left 2.5 million people homeless and sent countless people fleeing to the United States.

Several hundred of those refugees have made their way to Chicago and DuPage County.

Among them are children dubbed "Lost Boys," who traveled thousands of miles alone through jungles, past militants and wild animals to safety.

A group of Lost Boys will visit Fermilab for a lunchtime presentation and discussion from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. Dec. 17 in One West. The group will talk about their experiences in Sudan and the United States and a Chicago-area campaign to create a community center for Sudanese refugees to help them build new lives and maintain their heritage.

The Fermilab Planning Group for Multicultural Events organized the visit as part of Universal Human Rights Month.

In the News

Mich. State Univ. awarded nuclear physics facility

From Associated Press, Dec. 11, 2008

The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday chose Michigan State University for a $550 million cutting-edge nuclear physics research facility that could attract top scientists from around the world and boost the state's economy.

The facility, which would be built within 10 years, could spark scientific breakthroughs affecting medicine, national defense research and the environment.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said the announcement signals a commitment from the U.S. government to the science involved in the new technology. Funding for construction of the new facility still must be secured through Congress.

"This is wonderful news," Stabenow said. "This could not come at a more critical time for us as we're struggling with our economy."

Michigan State had been competing with Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois for the facility for rare isotope beams. Thursday's announcement culminates a process that started in 1996 when a long-range plan first recommended the development of a next-generation nuclear structure and astrophysics facility as a high priority.

MiniBooNE reports first antineutrino results

Despite enormous progress in the field of neutrino physics over the last two decades, numerous mysteries and basic questions about neutrino oscillations remain. This week, the MiniBooNE collaboration released a preliminary result that sheds more light on neutrino oscillations.

The MiniBooNE experiment explores the question whether muon neutrinos morph into electron neutrinos while traveling relatively short distances. In the 1990s, the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory seemed to have observed such a signal for antineutrinos. Based on results obtained with neutrinos, the MiniBooNE collaboration announced in April 2007 that its experiment could not confirm the LSND result. Instead, at neutrino energies lower than what would be expected under a simple two-neutrino mixing interpretation of LSND, MiniBooNE found a 3.7-sigma excess of electron neutrinos emerging from the primary beam of muon neutrinos.

This puzzling observation opened up the door for new questions. Is the low-energy excess observed by MiniBooNE in neutrino mode due to some misestimated background? Is it due to some new physics? Can it be related to the LSND anomaly observed for antineutrinos?

While theorists have been pondering possibilities, the MiniBooNE experiment has been busy collecting new data with a predominantly antineutrino beam. In this mode, data are acquired five times slower than in the neutrino mode because of a reduction in the overall antineutrino event rate.